Larger classes may mean more dropouts

Benjamin Brink Reynolds students, including freshman Ricky Olson, crowd into Greg Cole's math class as they work on a math quiz.

Oregon schools are opening with signs in some districts that class sizes are once again on the rise. When class sizes climb, so does the state's dropout rate.

As The Oregonian's Kimberly Melton recentluy reported, Reynolds High opened with as many as 40 students in some classes, thanks in part to teacher cuts and a record-sized freshman class. Teachers in other Portland area schools also are reporting classrooms filled with 40 or more students. The West Linn-Wilsonville School District, for example, lost 25 positions, and that means larger classes.

Oregon's annual dropout rate over the last decade has dipped and climbed with the number of teachers. When the number of teachers dropped to nearly 27,000 in 1998, the dropout rate hit 6.9 percent. When teacher ranks climbed to 31,000 in 2007, the dropout rate had fallen to 3.2 percent.

Parents dread large classes for their students - one reason some are willing to buy the advantage of smaller classes by sending their children to private schools. As Oregonian reporter Wendy Owen recently wrote, some Oregon parents in the current economic slump are dipping into college funds, giving up vacations and using cred cards to keep their children in private schools. Nine out of 10 parents see the dropout rate as the most serious problem in our public education system, according to Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup Poll reported this month.

High school reform research shows that students begin to get lost and left behind when teachers have too many students. The Coalition for Essential Schools, an organization that has successfully reformed some high schools, says teachers must know who they teach and recommends that "no teacher have direct responsibility for more than 80 students in the high school and middle school and no more than 20 in the elementary school." Many Oregon high school teachers this year are responsible for more than 200 students, which makes it impossible for them to know and serve all their students well. As the Gate Foundation has discovered, simply making schools small is not sufficient to make them excel, but it is necessary high schools find ways to make personal connections with every student or they will lose some of them.

A recent study by the Oregon Department of Education shows Oregon is losing way too many students, far more than its estimates would suggest. Rather than estimate, the state actually tracked every student in the class of 2008 and found 15,269 of those who started high school in 2004 or joined along the way did not earn a diploma. That meant only 68 percent of the class graduated within four years. At Reynolds, the picture was worse – only 51 percent of its students earned a diploma. -- Chalk It Up